The internet is starting to realize something unsettling: our iPhones send information about the people we know to private servers, often without our permission. Some offending apps are fixing themselves. Some aren't. But the underlying problem is much bigger.

Path faced a privacy flap when it was revealed that the company was uploading users' address book data to its servers without permission. While it stopped doing that and deleted all the data it had stored, a larger issue remains.

Twitter may have the exclusive status of being built into iOS for sharing purposes, but that doesn't mean Apple's ignoring Facebook. In addition to Twitter handles, Contacts in iOS5 has spots for Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and totally inexplicably, MySpace. [AllThingsD]

You probably have more friends scattered across more social networks than you can even think of right now. Friends wants to be the place where you can find them all—and see what they're saying, wherever they're saying it.

Google allows its users to download their data for exporting elsewhere. But after their tough stance against Facebook not sharing its own data, they blocked that option. Facebook's cleverly circumnavigated the block, meaning Gmail users can still find friends there.

While SIM cards hold all the stuff address books used to, some people just can't part from that old ink-and-paper. The SIMbook lets people know that you're aware of modern technology, yet you choose to go retro.

The app works, I'd guess by sending the closely matching accelerometer data back to the Tapulous server, where they're matched in the cloud and info is swapped. There is no actual device-to-device connection—but that is still ridiculously cool. Tapulous is also planning to release Tap Tap Revenge and Twinkle as free…

Here's a little key chain trinket that's small enough to easily carry around in your pocket. The Royal SCR1 SIM Card Reader/Writer keeps all your keys together and functions as an alarm clock, stopwatch, timer, and best of all, it can read and write to that SIM card that's in your GSM-based cellphone.